thoughts (and links) of a retired "social scientist" as he tries to make sense of the world.....

what you get here

This is not a blog which expresses instant opinions on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers as jumping-off points for some reflections about our social endeavours.

It’s almost
exactly 40 years since my contribution “What Sort of Over-Government?” was
published with a score of others in the famous Red Paper on Scotland which was edited by Gordon Brown destined some 32 years later to become
British Prime Minister. Interesting to read all these years later the introduction he wrote to the book which attracted a long review in the New Left Review

Scotland has
been putting on its spectacles with commendable eagerness to read the minute
print of a ‘Red Paper’ or socialist symposium on the state of the nation, which
has reached the best-seller lists.It
is a collection of twenty-eight essays, edited by Edinburgh University’s
student rector, Gordon Brown. A dozen of the authors are academics, seven
writers or journalists—though many are political activists as well. There are
two trade-unionists, two Labour MPS. Six pieces deal with social problems,
five with devolution, local government or administration, three with North Sea
oil, three others with industry and finance, three with land and the Highlands.
Despite the comprehensive investigation of Scotland and Scottish nationalism
contained in the book, some topics were bound to get left out. There might have
been something on religion and the Churches, considering how near at hand
Ulster is. There might have been something on women and the family. Still,
their contributions, of very varying length, are all carefully thought out and
well documented.

I was fresh
then in my position as Secretary of the Labour Cabinet of the newly-created
Strathclyde Regional Council which covered half of Scotland and ran a huge
empire of teachers, socials workers, police, engineers etc. My piece drew on
seven years’ experience as a leading Labour councillor in a shipbuilding town –
active in challenging the paternalistic approach which characterised Labour
councils in those days. The reference to “over-government” was partly to the
fears then of a fourth (Scottish) layer of government being added to appease
the upsurge of scottish nationalism but more to the style of government in those days – and
the assumptions it made about the passivity of the citizen.

I famously
said that “The debate (about devolution) has been a serious distraction” –
from, that is, the poverty and inequities some of us were at least being
enabled by the new system of regional government to tackle.

A Yes
vote may get rid of the Tories - but
that doesn’t mean you will get rid of Tory ideas, a few of which are front and
centre in the SNP’s/Yes campaign’s independence manifesto (or white paper),
titled ‘Scotland’s Future’. The positions laid out on corporation tax, the
monarchy, and NATO membership would sit more than comfortably in the pages of a
Tory manifesto.

More importantly,
the idea that abandoning millions of people who’ve stood with us – and us with
them – in trade union struggles, political campaigns, progressive movements,
etc, for generations – the idea that this can be considered progress is
anathema to me. The analogy of the Titanic applies, wherein rather than woman
and children, it is Scots to the lifeboats and to hell with everybody else……In 2014
economic sovereignty does not lie with national governments as it once did.
Today economic sovereignty lies with global capital under that extreme variant
of capitalism known as neoliberalism – or the free market. The notion that
separation from a larger state would allow said smaller state to forge a social
democratic utopia without challenging said neoliberal nostrums is simply not
credible.

A patchwork
of smaller states plays into the hands of global capital, as it means more
competition for inward investment, which means global corporations are able to
negotiate more favourable terms in return for that investment. The inevitable
result is a race to the bottom as workers in one state compete for jobs with
workers in neighbouring states. In this regard it is surely no accident that
Rupert Murdoch is a vocal supporter of Scottish independence.

Support for
Scottish independence among progressives in Scotland is rooted in despair over
a status quo of Tory barbarity. This is understandable. For the past three
decades working class communities throughout the UK have suffered a relentless
assault under both Conservative and Labour administrations. The Labour Party,
under the baneful influence and leadership of Tony Blair and his New Labour
clique, came to be unrecognizable from the party that created the welfare
state, including the NHS, and the party that once held full employment as a
guiding principle of its economic and social policy.

The embrace
of free market nostrums under New Labour meant that the structural inequality
that obtained after 18 years of Tory rule remained more or less intact. The
market was now the undisputed master of all it surveyed. The consequence of
Labour’s shift to the right has been to give rise to cynicism, disappointment,
and lack of faith in politics among large swathes of voters, evinced in ever
lower turnouts at elections. Issues such as the lies and subterfuge surrounding
Britain going to war in Iraq in 2003, the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2011,
followed by the phone hacking scandal – during which the unhealthy relationship
between the owners and editors of tabloid newspapers and politicians was
revealed – has only deepened this cynical disregard for politics and
politicians in Britain, giving rise to anti-politics as the default position of
many voters.

In Scotland –
for decades a Labour Party stronghold – devolution has allowed a protest vote
to make the electorate’s feelings towards this Labour Party betrayal of its
founding principles known at the ballot box. Regardless, the most significant
protest has been a non-vote, with turnouts at elections in Scotland following
the pattern of the rest of the country in remaining low. For example, there was
only a 50 percent turnout at the last Scottish Parliamentary elections in 2011,
out of which the Scottish National Party (SNP) emerged with an overall
majority, the first time any party has managed to do so since the Scottish
Parliament came into existence in 1999.

The myth that
Scotland is more left-leaning than rest of the UKHowever the
argument that Scotland is more left-leaning than the rest of the UK is one that
seeks to conflate conservatism with England in its entirety, rather than a
specific region of the country, which in conjunction with the antiquated first
past the post electoral system of Westminster elections has thrown up Tory
governments that are unrepresentative of where the majority of England and the
rest of the UK sits politically.Scotland is
no more left-leaning than the deindustrialised North East, North West, and
Midlands of England. Nor is it any more left leaning than Wales. The working
class in Scotland is not any more progressive than its English or Welsh
counterpart.

Monday, August 25, 2014

There is a
missing question at the heart of the debate about independence which has, for
the past 2 years, been gripping my homeland, the small nation of Scotland – and
that is how to avoid the savage judgement which “the markets” (ie
global capital) would almost certainly inflict in the aftermath of a yes vote - as per the experience of Francois
Mitterand’s government almost 30 years ago when it tried to implement its left-wing manifesto commitments..

The
government which has had majority support in the Scottish Parliament since 2007
was wary of putting their commitment to independence to the vote but has played
a canny game since then – judging that Scotland’s experience of right-wing
Coalition cuts since 2011 gave them the best opportunity to realise the dream
of Scottish independence.

Since the
Scottish Parliament was reconstituted in 1999 (after almost 300 years of
silence) – with considerable independent powers but within a budget transferred
from London – the “Scottish Executive” (of whatever political colour) has
played with a social democrat bat. The neo-liberal agenda has been strongly
resisted – as indicated in a variety of measures relating to health, education
and social care – let alone the commitment to expelling the British nuclear
submarines from the River Clyde. Indeed for Scottish Nationalist spokesmen,
this last would seem to be the only thing that would change in a post-yes
Scotland.

Membership of the European Union, of NATO, of the
pound – somehow – would magically remain….

It is this
simple statement which exposes the weakness of the case for independence. Who could resist voting for continued free health care; free university education (now for half of the relevant peer group); almost free sheltered accommodation for the elderly and many other things? They no longer exist in England but have been voted in by the 15 year-old Sottish Parliament - all paid for by the block transfer payment which comes from the UK exchequer. I
have just watched a powerful speech by an ex-MSP (member of the Scottish
Parliament) from the Scottish Socialist Party – typical of the sort of discussions which have been taking place the length
and breadth of this small country over the past 2 years since the date of the referendum was at last set.

Francis
Curran speaks of her experience - first as a researcher at Westminster and then
as a Scottish parliamentarian - of being besieged by the lobbyists for
companies wanting to cash in on the cash bonanza enjoyed by companies from the privatisation
and marketization agenda of London governments - an agenda which successive Scottish governments have been able to resist under their devolved powers….. She convinces the listener of the agenda being strongly
pursued by monied interests – but then fails to ask how that same capital will
deal with the uncertainties in the next 2 years as country which, having broken away, has then to
negotiate a deal with various international bodies. It is not enough to ask
whether Scotland is rich enough to be independent – patently it is. The
question is how much of that richness will be discounted negatively by global
capital. Only leftist economists can try to deal with such a question…..and the
media exclude them from the discussion.

It could be
said that this evening is make or break for the United Kingdom. The second of
two debates will take place between Scotland’s First Minister and the Leader of
the Yes Campaign – Alaister Darling who has the disadvantage of having been
Chancellor of the Exchequer during the Global Crisis. The main focus will
apparently be the National Health Service – with Darling in the unenviable
position of trying to explain how an independent Scotland will be in a better
position to withstand such neo-liberalism. Those of you wishing to follow the
latest strands of the argument which will play out on 18 September should read this post from a yes-voter;also here; and here

On a
personal note, I have 3 daughters – all brought up in Scotland only one of whom
will be able to vote…my ex-wife and I are barred by virtue of no longer having
any residence in the country……I feel angry...and disenfranchised. My only consolation is that the 2 votes of my first wife and daughter will probably cancel one another....

Sunday, August 24, 2014

David Marquand
is one of England’s most emblematic political figures -

journalist,
historian, (briefly) Labour MP and Brussels Eurocrat, University professor,
Oxford University Principal and contributor to think tanks galore. Most
importantly, he has been for many decades our foremost centre-left public
intellectual, taking up arms against the corruption of our society by
unprincipled, uncaring, neo-liberal marketisation and the resulting decline of
the public realm.

I have just
finished his most recent short book - Mammon’s Kingdom – an essay on Britain, Nowwhose
review by Kenneth
Morgan, the key historian of figures of the British left, forms the core of this post. The book's theme -

is the
commercialisation of our culture and institutions. This has been most
destructive since the Thatcher years, but, fine historian that he is, he shows
that the roots lie much earlier, with the close link between finance and the
state since Hanoverian times. There was a sharp reversal during and after the
Second World War, when a new “clerisy”, variously composed of social critics
like George Orwell, progressive civil servants like William Beveridge,
working-class patriots like Aneurin Bevan and the Communist Arthur Horner
recaptured the public ethic of Ruskin, Mill and Arnold.

The rot set
in with disciples of economic individualism after 1944, pursuing the mirage of
a free-market utopia along with (Marquand believes, perhaps more
contentiously), a destructive “moral individualism.” Since then, the cohesion
and self-belief of Britain as a comity have been undermined.Marquand
analyses superbly the implications of this.·A sense of
history has been replaced by a glib, uncomprehending journalistic
"presentism".

·A humane Keynesian-style
economics has been supplanted by a dogmatic cult whose followers uphold an
unthinking, unjustified faith in the impregnable rationality of the market, and
the abstract "choices" allegedly open to a rational calculating
individual.

·Communal institutions
such as local authorities or the civil service are degraded by a market state.
Public values are driven out by an all-encompassing commercialism, as shown
variously in the debasement of our universities, the sacrifice of sanity on the
environment, and the undermining of the welfare state.

·Our
democracy is relentlessly eroded by lobbying corporate capitalism, resulting in
a tax structure skewed in favour of the rich and a political structure debased
by invasion by private wealth. Marquand describes the "revolving
doors" through which ex-politicians glide effortlessly into the capitalist
utopia, a process most notoriously symbolised by Tony Blair.

·Worst of
all, society is being atomised, riven by class division, its language of
cohesion debased by the cheap slogans of media commentators, its sense of
belonging, neighbourhood and human sympathy shredded everywhere, from the church
to the public library to the bus queue.

We no longer seem to know each other.
And so we no longer trust each other. Public goods and services, long taken for
granted, are withering into commercialised decay. We have made a cheap,
corrosive society, a world fit for Fred Goodwin to shred in.And the
tragedy is, as Marquand shows, that much of this is due to moral surrenders by
those previously in authority – the "flunkeyism" of civil servants,
the avarice of professions (look at current vice-chancellors), the
"charismatic populism" of politicians from Margaret Thatcher to David
Cameron who have destroyed the values they inherited.

The manifold
evils of the process are beyond dispute. But wherein lies the remedy? Here the
book is rather more disappointing. The answer, it seems, is "a
wide-ranging national conversation", in which the ideas upheld by
philosophers past, notably Burke, Mill, Tawney, are proclaimed anew.The themes
for this kind of nationwide seminar are of unquestionable value. Burke, for long
an improbable hero for conservatives, is rightly rescued as a celebrant of the
social roots of living communities, and a prophet of cultural pluralism whether
in Ireland or India. They are to be backed up by two less likely camp-followers
– Karl Marx and Jesus Christ, the greatest prophet of the inexorable advance of
monopoly capitalism, alongside the prophet of the priesthood of all believers.

But donnish
dominion, like patriotism, may not be enough. We need action as well as
conversation. We have now a contrasting critique of the inherent inequalities
of the capitalist order from Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First
Century. He prescribes specific radical policies – global action on higher
incomes and tax avoidance, annual taxation on wealth and property, help for
working-class victims like a stable minimum wage, a restoration of labour
unions.

The
difference between Piketty and Marquand may be one of national culture. It is
Gallic rage versus Anglo-Saxon sweetness and light.But Marquand
has the roots within him to go much further. The book is dedicated to his
father, Hilary and his great-grandfather, Ebenezer Rees. They were very
different kinds of Welshmen – Hilary an economics professor at Cardiff,
Ebenezer a journalist who founded the first Welsh socialist newspaper, Llais
Llafur (Voice of Labour). What they had in common was that both were full of
radical ideas on how to repair their fractured society.Perhaps
Marquand's next work could recapture the values of the land of his fathers, to
rebuild that "richer, deeper democracy" which our poor, corrupted
country so desperately needs.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

"How can I know what I think until I read
what I write?" is a lovely quotation (from Henry James) which
sits at the masthead of a rather specialised economics blog by a German Professor. It very much summarises the spirit of this blog and
today’s in particular.

For a couple
of days I’ve been wanting to do a post on the “Manual for Counter-technopols” which was an Annex in a sadly-forgotten book called The New Zealand Experimentproduced
in 1995 by Jane Kelsey.

I was reminded of it as I read Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste.

The Manual is a list of injunctionsfor
those who wanted (in the 1990s) to fight neo-liberalism. Twenty years on, the
phrases still resonate eg –

- Resist marketspeak – maintain control of
the language, challenge its capture, and refuse to convert your discourse to
theirs. Insist on using hard terms that convey the hard realities of what is
going on.

- Be realistic and avoid nostalgia—recognise
that the world has changed, in some ways irreversibly, and the past was far
from perfect. Avoid being trapped solely into reaction and critique. Many
neo-liberal criticisms of the status quo are justiﬁed and will strike a chord
with people. Defending the past for its own sake adds credibility to their
arguments and wastes opportunities to work for genuine change.

- Be proactive and develop real altematives –
start rethinking visions, strategies and models of development for the future.
Show that there are workable, preferable alternatives from the start. This
becomes progressively more difficult once the programme takes hold.

The Manual can
be read in its entirety in the link – but, somehow, failed to move me. It was
too general, too vague….too rhetorical.

So, as the dawn come up over the
mountains at 05.00 today, I started to surf for inspiration and hit first a
review in Book Forum of Utopia or Bust which is a look at some of the key left theorists about the global crisis - by Benjamin
Kunkel who, I remembered, had written the recent great reviewof Thomas Piketty’s current blockbuster to which I referred a few days ago.
Kunkel – like other great reviewers of the London Review of Books – is actually
a writer.

The
publisher of his latest book is one of several fascinating small publishers who
are coming to my attention - Zero Books (Not to be confused with Zed books !)

My study
faces due east and the morning sun (when it appears!) always hits my eyes. At
10.00 I can’t help but notice that the skies are cloudless – but with quite a
chilly breeze making it impossible to sit on the open terrace for more than 5 minutes.
I began to realise that I don’t write very much about Europe these days; and
manage to come across a new website – the European Cultural Foundation and an interesting booklet on the Dwarfing of Europewhich in turn led me to a worthy-looking journal on things European founded by
a Bulgarian – EUInside with this useful overview of a recent forum in Croatia

On days like
this, I wonder whether I shouldn’t call this blog – Surfing in the Carpathians.
It reminds me of the great book Europa Europa by Hans Magnus Enzensberger which contained an essay entitled “The Seacoast of
Bohemia”

Monday, August 18, 2014

From 1968 to
the early 1980s I had a pretty relaxed life – paid to read and regurgitate to
polytechnic students whatever took my fancy in the burgeoning social science
literature of the time – variously urban and regional management; and certain
aspects of political studies. At the same time I was a serious “political
bureaucrat” ie able to use a position as a Chairman of municipal and Regional
social policy systems to give direction to an army of officials.

That gave me
the opportunity to draft various papers describing the radical changes some of
us were trying to make to our public management systems – influenced by a
critique of “legalistic professionalism” which was beginning to come from the
left, right and centre. Key names in these diverse “schools” were Saul Alinsky,
Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire and those associated with the British CDP work of the early 1970s;
James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock of the Public Choice school;
and a raft of management gurus who started (with Russell Ackoff) by celebrating
corporate management and ended (with Tom Peters) by celebrating chaos.

What we were trying to do
attracted the interest of a few researchers – in particular the famous
Tavistock Institute (its Institute for Operation Research with John Friend);
the Institute of Local Government Studies (Birmingham) and a handful of
individual scholars such as Harry Smart who produced in 1991 a book with the
rather convoluted title Criticism and public rationality – professional rigidity and the search for caring government which includes a “Coda” written by me.

One of my assistants at the time was someone who later
occupied some prominent positions, culminating in the Directorship of the
renowned Schumacher College and who edited a large volume in which I make a
contribution – The Making of an Empowering Profession

From 1983,
however, my (very patient) employers began to expect more serious academic work
from me – while I was still holding down several senior political positions. In
1985 I reached breaking point and was forced to give up academic work. For 5
fraught years I operated as a full-time Regional political bureaucrat - searching,
at the same time, for a channel for my energies and experience. I was lucky –
the Berlin Wall fell and the European networks I had been developing gave me an
amazing opportunity to use my understanding and skills in central Europe as a
free-lance consultant.

I suppose
some people would say I’m a dilettante – operating like a gadfly. But my
particular skills-set includes promiscuous, inter-disciplinary reading;
communications; networking; and a good memory. I am annoyed by the number of high-profile
writers operating within narrow intellectual frameworks - who clearly have little
sense of what has been going in related disciplines; and/or fail to reference
the work of others ploughing similar critiques.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

I mentioned
the 41 page bibliography to be found at the back of Mirowski’s book – this is
not as impressive as at it might seem to the casual reader. Indeed in anyone
else’s book, I might suspect such a list
is a sign of self-doubt and a need to assert one’s status…. It’s pretty easy to
compile a list – what is much more challenging is to summarise the key argument
of each book or article and to make a judgement about how it compares in, for
example, coherence with others. Even better if you can classify the various
explanations and fit the books into such a classification – Howard Davies, for
example, identified 39 different explanations of the financial meltdown

I’ve googled
various phrases to try to find such an annotated bibliography of the global
crisis – and cannot really find one - let alone one with a decent structure. By
way of comparison, look at the annotated bibliography for “change agents” I put
on my website a few years back

Responsibilities, ethics and the Financial Crisisis a useful website……part of a 3 year Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project which brings together "philosophers, economists and social policy academics". It too has reading lists - but none of them annotated.

So
where, please, is there a real annotated bibliography of the events which are
now shaping a generation – if not a civilisation ??? And can anyone offer a
reason for this absence??

Saturday, August 16, 2014

I said that
Mirowski was important – the man clearly knows his stuff (see the 41 page
bibliography at the back of his book). It’s just that he’s undisciplined in the
presentation of his arguments and assumes too easily that his readers will
understand the esoteric references to theoretical disputes in economics.

Never Let a
Serious Crisis go to Waste rates almost as many serious reviews as Thomas Piketty’s
blockbuster - Capital in the Twenty First Century to which the London Review of
Books devoted last month a quite excellent review whose opening section must qualify as one of the clearest expositions of the
disputes about economic value.

Overall,
therefore, this book may be tough going for many, but it also rewards the
reading. The looseness of structure combined with the sense in which each
element depends on the others means that the reader shouldn’t worry too much if
they didn’t get it the first time. I certainly do not expect this to be
everyone’s cup of tea: the way Mirowski approaches neoliberalism through a
combination of polemical investigation into institutional and organisational
connections between finance, government, and economics, as well as his tendency
to give mostly ideological and psychological explanations for political
phenomena, sometimes comes uncomfortably close to ‘conspiracy thinking’. I
think Mirowski mostly stays just on the right side of that fine line, but then
I am already an opponent of neoclassical economics – those who are more
ambivalent about it will perhaps find this work too much.For the
politically more radical but less economically knowledgeable layperson, there
is a wealth of insight to be gained here in the inner workings and thinking of
some of the major players of the Western neoliberal order, especially in the
United States, but you’ll have to earn it with hard work. There are some
fascinating moments in the book where Mirowski contrasts the reality of the
crisis with the utter refusal on the part of the economics discipline to view
it as imaginable before the fact (we were supposed to be in ‘the Great
Moderation’) or of any theoretical significance after the fact (in striking
interviews with Chicago school economists).

On the other hand, he sometimes
overdoes the pervasive power of neoliberal thought: when he sees social
networks as inherently neoliberal, or sees protest movements such as Occupy as
hopelessly co-opted by neoliberal ways of thinking from the start, it seems a
bit too much in the style of grandpa telling the kids to get off his lawn.
Neoliberalism isn’t, and cannot be, all-powerful – even if the opposition has
to date indeed been ineffectual.For the
purposes of economic thought, the takeaway from this book should be that “the
relationship between the immunity of finance and the imperviousness of change
in economic ideas has been direct” (357).

For the political left, the central
message is that the strategy of neoliberalism to a crisis – any crisis –
can be summed up as “short-run denialism… medium-term imposition of
state-sponsored markets, and long-term recruitment of entrepreneurs to explore
scientific blue-sky projects to transform human relationships to nature”, all
of which “can only be imposed in those special moments of ‘emergency’ by a strong
state” (357-358). These lessons, combined with Mirowski’s vision of
neoliberalism as contrasted with merely ‘small government, free market’
thinking, are important to learn.

Mirowski has
been fairly caustic about Wikipedia – and perhaps this is why his entry there
is so brief and uninformative. I managed to find this overview and interview

Certainly
the book has encouraged me to pull off the shelves some so far unread items
such as the Penguin History of Economics; The Romantic Economist; and Ha-Joon
Chang’s Economics; the User’s Guide

Friday, August 15, 2014

Reader –
while you have been busy this last 24 hours or so, I have been sweating blood
on your behalf! A few minutes ago, I reached (with a great sigh of relief) the
last page of Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste and its pages will forever bear witness to my reactions and interactions – with
savagely pencilled circles and slashes on almost every page.

The subject
of this book could not be more important – the
process whereby a doctrine (neoliberalism), assumed in 2008 to have been
totally discredited, has managed not only to survive but to become the only game
in town…

On your
behalf I have (carefully) read 358 pages of text; glanced at 52 pages of notes;
and noted with interest a 41 page bibliography. And I have also turned up at
least a score of fairly long reviews – indeed even one special issue of a journal
devoted to the book (available at the hyperlink of the book’s title) which,
usefully, contains an author’s reply. The book's (mercifully short) conclusion poses these questions-

·What were the key causes
of the crisis?

·Have economists of any
stripe managed to produce a coherent and plausible narrative of the crisis, at
least so far? And what role have heterodox economists played in the dispute?·What are the major
political weaknesses of the contemporary neoliberal movement?·What is the current
topography of the Neoliberal Thought Collective?·What lessons should the
left learn from the neoliberals, and which should they abjure?·What would a vital
counternarrative to the epistemological commitments of the neoliberals look
like?

But the book touches (and briefly at that) only on the second and fourth of these questions –
the others he suggests “demand lavishly
documented advocacy and lengthy disputations” and maybe an alternative left
project.

His book, he
concludes with surprising modesty for such a pyrotechnic writer, simply “dispels some commonplace notions that have
gotten in the way of such a project”.

He then goes
on to a final one-page summary of the 6 reasons why “neoliberals
have triumphed in the global economic crisis” -·Contrary
evidence didn’t dent their world view·They
“redoubled their efforts to influence and
capture the economics profession”·“everyday neoliberalism” which had “taken root in our culture provided a bulwark
until The “Neoliberal Thought
Collective” (NTC) could mount further
responses”·The
NTC developed the black art of “agnotology”
(see below) and -·“coopted protest movements through a
combination of top-down takeover and bottom-up commercialisation and
privatisation of protest activities and recruitment”

He was,
however, kind enough to proffer (at page 226) a definition of“agnotology” (to which an entire section
is devoted) - namelythe “focused study of
the intentional manufacture of doubt and uncertainty in the general populace
for specific political motives”.

And he does
also explain a couple of other neologisms – “murketing” and “buycott” (both
of which my automatic speller annoyingly tries to correct)

“Dissention” at page 243 presumably is
“dissension”. You see, Reader, the efforts to which I have gone for you!

The
reader is still entitled to expect something better than the following (fromPhilip
Mirowski's new book "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to
Waste"): Yet
the nightmare cast its shroud in the guise of a contagion of a
deer-in-the-headlights paralysis.

That
is not just a mixed metaphor; it is meaningless and pretentious at the same
time. One would nominate it as the world's worst-written sentence but it is
only the opening clause. After a semi-colon, the author drones on for a further
32 words, from whichEconomist readers
should be spared. Just a few pages later, Mr Mirowski produces another monstrosity:The
nostrum of "regulation" drags with it a raft of unexamined
impediments concerning the nature of markets and governmentality, and a muddle
over intentionality, voluntarism, and spontaneity that promulgates the
neoliberal creed at the subconscious level.

What
happened to the editing process at Verso, which allowed this book to be
published? All authors benefit from a trimming of their stylistic excesses. The
odd flourish is fine and an attempt at humour in a work of financial analysis
is usually welcome. But this does not consist of adding one clause after
another, or piling adjective upon adjective. Such
leaden prose weakens any hope that the author might have of persuading the
reader to slog through his 467-page attack on neoliberalism. George Orwell's
rules of writing (which introduceThe Economist'sin-house style guide), are always worth repeating

One of the discussants in the subsequent discussion thread suggested
four reasons for verbosity:

1) Try selling a one-page book. This
despite the fact most of what I have read on economics in recent years, and indeed
ever, could comfortably fit - too many books are just one interesting insight
smeared over 400 pages ("Black Swan" anyone?).

4) Attempted argument by verbosity - while single-sentence phrasing would be
just as informative, droning on about it from different angles for twenty hours
of reading is intended to be more effective in helping the ideas (or lack
thereof) sink in.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

A pile of
journals and books was waiting for me on and under my neighbour’s table when I
arrived back on Sunday at the mountain house – not just the blessed London
Review of Books and (less honoured) New Statesman but the first couple of
issues of a professional journal to which I am now resubscribing - Public Administration – an international quarterly.
This used to be my staple reading in the 1980s and 1990s – along with The Political Quarterly and many others – but the increasingly narrow scope and leaden prose of
such academic journals had driven me away about 15 years ago.

If only for
their book reviews, however, they are an important way of keeping me in touch with
what professionals in my field are thinking about – no matter how their choice
of subjects are so often distorted by the competition for academic promotion.
So the delights of The Political Quarterly have also started arriving – and I
am also thinking of renewing my acquaintance with the journal Governance

Amazingly
Wiley publications which owns these journals is offering (for those who already are subscribing to one journal in their Politics stable) a 30 day free trial
viewing of all of the Politics journals in their stable – about 100 – archives
and all! So that will keep me fairly quiet in the next few weeks

The book’s
opening pages annoyed me no end. Most (of the considerable number of) reviews
have been very positive but one caught my feelings exactly -

Mirowski’s
aggressive yet obtuse writing style seems designed to alienate casual readers,
cuts off discussions of potential alternatives out of the current morass, and
ironically paints too positive a picture of where orthodoxy stands at the current
moment.

But I will
have to persevere since, like most people, I have been too casual in my use of
the term and do need to understand why social democrats are so powerless in
face of this phenomenon. Three years ago I wrote an article on this – called The Dog that Didn’t Bark which appeared in a special issue of Revista 22(a Romanian journal) which was
commemorating 09/11

At that
time, Colin Crouch was one of the few people who had devoted a book to the
question (The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism)

Three years
on, a lot more people have written about it and Philip Mirowski (the author of
the latest) reviewed some of them in the journal I referred
to recently.

Mirowski has
helpfully put online one of the key sections of his book – the thirteen commandments of neo-liberalism - which allows you, reader, to see for yourself what I mean about the convoluted style. He can also be heard on some ipod interviews here, here and hereAnd Colin Crouch himself has returned to the charge in a (free) article

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Apologies
to my readers – Vivacom, the Bulgarian internet provider I have been using these past few weeks, has been unable
to give me access since the weekend. They simply are not able to process my
request for increased capacity after I hit their limit (in only 3 months real time). I use it for my blog and downloading the odd paper – no videos. Visits to
their branches are pointless – the telephone calls I make to their helplines
don’t achieve anything except promises and, ultimately, admissions that they
just have to wait for the request to be “processed”. When I come back in
October, I will cancel my sub - and go wireless….

This
week I’ve been busy with preparations for the new website, drafting for example this (rather long) intro -

The
site has been created by someone who has, since the mid-60s, been involved in
various forms of “development” efforts – first “community” and “regional”
development in Scotland then “institutional” and “capacity” development in
Central Europe and Asia – but who, with many others, now questions the very
concept of development….Indeed the title I gave my second (more autobiographical)
little book in 1995 was …. PUZZLING DEVELOPMENT

It
was some 15 years ago that I began to feel the deep unease about the direction societies
with which I was familiar seemed to be taking – increasing privilege, systemic
corruption, centralization, ecological destruction, “consumerism”, poverty,
privatisation and a failure of European vision were the things I listed in a
paper I circulated amongst friends in an effort to clarify where I should be
putting the energies and resources left to me. I itemized the people and
organisations whose work I admired; regretted the lack of impact they were
having; and then explored what channels we seemed to have for making more of an
impact. A
decade later – after the bursting of the bubble – I returned to the subject and
beefed up the paper – the results of which can be read at Draft Guide for the
Perplexed

WHAT BROUGHT ME TO THIS
POINT - 2008
was supposed to bring us to our senses – to give us the sort of focus we last saw
in the immediate post-war years when social, political and commercial energies
were building a better world; greed and flashiness kept then in check; and
“government” was an institution for whose efforts we had some respect if not
pride.

Six
years on from the most recent global crisis, such hopes and expectations are in
tatters… the façade of democracy has been ruthlessly exposed by the latest debt
crisis in Europe… and governments seem hell-bent on creating a dystopia of privatized public
facilities, repression and gross inequalities which put JK
Galbraith’s indictment 60 years ago of “private affluence and public squalour”
in the shade.

A
world of gated communities exists cheek by jowl with those inhabited by crushed
spirits of millions evicted from the formal economy or in fear of that fate;
politicians, politics and the media are despised as lapdogs of what an American
President in 1960 presciently labelled the “military-industrial
complex”. Welcome to post-modernity!

This website aims to
examine this condition, explore how it has developed and how it might be
tamed….The
website believes in the importance of what the academics have taken to calling
“agency” – that is, of people coming together to try to improve socio-economic
conditions. Such efforts used to be national but now tend to be a combination
of local, continental and global. Some of the effort is driven by anger; some
by more creative urges - but hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are
involved in activities which have been charted by writers such as Paul Kingsnorth
and Paul Hawkin. They include a lot of social enterprise and cooperatives of
which the oldest and most inspiring is Mondragon whose various ventures now
employ more than 25,000 people in a mountain area of Spain.

But all this does not seem
able to inspire a common vision – let alone a coherent agenda and popular
support - for a better world.The
knowledge base drawn on in this site is European of an anglo-saxon variety – so
we cannot (sadly) speak much about, for example, the Latin American experience of development which,
patently, has a lot to teach us.

Some
of the conclusions which have brought me to the point of setting up this
website -

Political parties are a
bust flush - All
mainstream political parties in Europe have been affected by the neo-liberal
virus and can no longer represent the concerns of ordinary people. And those
“alternative parties” which survive the various hurdles placed in their way by
the electoral process rarely survive.The
German Greens were an inspiration until they too eventually fell prey to the
weaknesses of political parties identified a hundred years ago by Robert
Michels.More
recently, “Pirate” parties in Scandinavia and Bepe Grillo’s Italian Five Star Movement have managed,
briefly, to capture public attention, occupy parliamentary benches but then
sink to oblivion or fringe if not freak interest.

What
the media call “populist” parties of various sorts attract bursts of electoral
support in most countries but are led by labile individuals preying on public
fears and prejudices and incapable of the sort of cooperative effort which
serious change requires.

NGOs are no match for
corporate power - The
annual World Social Forum has had more
staying power than the various “Occupy movements” but its very diversity means
that nothing coherent emerges to challenge the power elite whose “scriptures”
are delivered from the pulpits of The World Bank and the OECDThere
doesn’t even seem a common word to describe our condition and a vision for a
better future – “social change”? What’s that when it’s at home?

Academics are careerists - the
groves of academia are still sanctuary for a few brave voices who speak out
against the careless transfer by governments of hundreds of billions of dollars
to corporate interests ……Noam Chomsky and David Harvey are prominent examples.

·Joseph
Stiglitz, once part of the World Bank elite, writes scathingly about economic
conventional wisdom.

·The
new Pope has the resources of the Vatican behind him; and is proving a great
example in the struggle for dignity and against privilege.

How can a new website help? - It
will identify the various efforts of the past decade to unite citizens under a
common banner for the sort of civilization that rewards dignified work and
effort. But it will also explore other, very different, visions – whether for political,
community or individual effort – which challenge most of the conventional ideas
about development and progress.

About Me

Can be contacted at bakuron2003@yahoo.co.uk
Political refugee from Thatcher's Britain (or rather Scotland) who has been on the move since 1991. First in central Europe - then from 1999 Central Asia and Caucasus. Working on EU projects - related to building capacity of local and central government. Home base is an old house in the Carpathian mountains and Sofia

about the blog

Writing in my field is done by academics - and gives little help to individuals who are struggling to survive in or change public bureaucracies. Or else it is propoganda drafted by consultants and officials trying to talk up their reforms. And most of it covers work at a national level - whereas most of the worthwhile effort is at a more local level. The restless search for the new dishonours the work we have done in the past. As Zeldin once said - "To have a new vision of the future it is first necessary to have new vision of the past".I therefore started this blog to try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history - particularly in the endeavour of what used to be known as "social justice". My generation believed that political activity could improve things - that belief is now dead and that cynicism threatens civilisationI also read a lot and wanted to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time or inclination -as well as my love of painting, particularly the realist 20th century schools of Bulgaria and Belgium.A final motive for the blog is more complicated - and has to do with life and family. Why are we here? What have we done with our life? What is important to us? Not just professional knowledge - but what used to be known, rather sexistically, as "wine, women and song" - for me now in the autumn of my life as wine, books and art....

quotes

“I will act as if what I do makes a difference”
William James 1890.

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas"
JM Keynes (1935)

"We've spent half a century arguing over management methods. If there are solutions to our confusions over government, they lie in democratic not management processes"
JR Saul (1992)

"There are four sorts of worthwhile learning - learning about · oneself
· learning about things
· learning how others see us
· learning how we see others"
E. Schumacher (author of "Small is Beautiful" (1973) and Guide for the Perplexed (1977))

"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."
Bertrand Russell, 1950

Followers

der arme Dichter (Carl Spitzweg)

my alter ego

the other site

In 2008 I set up a website in the (vain) hope of developing a dialogue around issues of public administration reform - particularly in transition countries where I have been living and working for the past 26 years. The site is www.freewebs.com/publicadminreform and contains the major papers I have written over the years about my attempts to reform various public organisations in the various roles which I've had - politician; academic/trainer; consultant.